Ynys knew all this well; and yet she too dreamed her Celtic dream—that, even yet, there might be redemption for the people. She did not share the wild hope which some of the older islanders held, that Christ himself shall come again to redeem an oppressed race; but might not another saviour arise, another redeeming spirit come into the world? And if so, might not that child of joy be born out of suffering and sorrow and crime; and if so, might not that child be born of her?
With startled eyes she crossed the thyme-set ledge whereon stood Caisteal-Rhona. Was it, after all, a message she had received from him who appeared to her in that lonely cavern of the sea; was he indeed Am Faidh, the mysterious Prophet of the isles?
[CHAPTER XIV]
THE LAUGHTER OF THE KING
What are dreams but the dust of wayfaring thoughts? Or whence are they, and what air is upon their shadowy wings? Do they come out of the twilight of man's mind; are they ghosts of exiles from vanished palaces of the brain; or are they heralds with proclamations of hidden tidings for the soul that dreams?
It was a life of dream that Ynys and Alan lived; but Ynys the more, for, as week after week went by, the burden of her motherhood wrought her increasingly. Ever since the night of Marsail's death, Alan had noticed that Ynys no longer doubted but that in some way a special message had come to her, a special revelation. On the other hand, he had himself swung back to his former conviction, that the vision he had seen upon the hillside was, in truth, that of a living man. From fragments here and there, a phrase, a revealing word, a hint gleaming through obscure allusions, he came at last to believe that some one bearing a close, and even extraordinary, resemblance to himself lived upon Rona. Although upon the island itself he could seldom persuade any one to speak of the Herdsman, the islanders of Seila and Borosay became gradually less reticent. He ascertained this, at least: that their fear and aversion, when he first came, had been occasioned by the startling likeness between him and the mysterious being whom they called Am Buchaille Bàn. On Borosay, he was told, the fishermen believed that the aonaran nan chreag, the recluse of the rocks, as commonly they spoke of him, was no other than Donnacha Bàn Carmichael, survived there through these many years, and long since mad with his loneliness and because of the burden of his crime. It was with keen surprise that Alan learned how many of the fishermen of Borosay and Berneray, and even of Barra, had caught a glimpse of the outcast. It was this relative familiarity, indeed, that was at the root of the fear and aversion which had met him upon his arrival. Almost from the moment he had landed in Borosay, the rumor had spread that he was indeed no other than Donnacha Bàn, and that he had chosen this way, now both his father and Alasdair Carmichael were dead, to return to his own place. So like was Alan to the outlaw who had long since disappeared from touch with his fellow men, that many were convinced that the two could be no other than one and the same. What puzzled him hardly less was the fact that, on the rare occasions when Ynys had consented to speak of what she had seen, the man she described bore no resemblance to himself. From one thing and another, he came at last to the belief that he had really seen Donnacha Bàn, his cousin; but that the vision of Ynys's mind was born of her imagination, stimulated by all the tragedy and strange vicissitudes she had known, and wrought by the fantastic tales of Marsail and Morag MacNeill.
By this time, too, the islanders had come to see that Alan MacAlasdair was certainly not Donnacha Bàn. Even the startling likeness no longer betrayed them in this way. The ministers and the priests laughed at the whole story and everywhere discouraged the idea that Donnacha Bàn could still be among the living. But for the unfortunate superstition that to meet the Herdsman, whether the lost soul of Donnacha Bàn or indeed the strange phantom of the hills of which the old legends spoke, was to meet inevitable disaster; but for this, the islanders might have been persuaded to make such a search among the caves of Rona as would almost certainly have revealed the presence of any who dwelt therein.
But as summer lapsed into autumn, and autumn itself through its golden silences waned into the shadow of the equinox, a quiet happiness came upon both Alan and Ynys. True, she was still wrought by her strange visionary life, though of this she said little or nothing; and, as for himself, he hoped that with the birth of the child this fantastic dream life would go. Whoever the mysterious Herdsman was—if he indeed existed at all except in the imaginations of those who spoke of him either as the Buchaille Bàn, or as the aonaran nan chreag—Alan believed that at last he had passed away. None saw him now: and even Morag MacNeill, who had often on moonlight nights caught the sound of a voice chanting among the upper solitudes, admitted that she now heard nothing unusual.